This writing is aimed to highlight one of the most important thing that has to be comprehend if one desires to analyze the Latin American landscape: its people and its racial-cultural mixture. The very two literatures that have been reviewed in this writing has shown many indications on how, historically, the people of Latin America has been ‘re-founded’ in the day where the Spanish and the Portuguese put the ‘throne’ in their land.
Racial and cultural mixture complicated and blurred society greatly after the Spanish and Portuguese conquest period, but many social criteria were still the same under the surface. The intermediary functions were still the province of those ranking lower than the Spaniards or even lowest in Latin America society, but that stratum now contained not only the least senior members (new immigrants from Spain and other European countries) and Africans but also large numbers of mestizos as well as mulattoes and increasingly even Indians who had mastered Spanish language and culture. To organize the diversity, the Spaniards resorted to an ethnic hierarchy, ranking each mixed type according to its physical and cultural closeness to a Spanish ideal.
However, as time goes by, racial and cultural fusion had advanced so far that the categorization embodied in the ethnic hierarchy could no longer capture it. Labels proliferated to designate complex mixtures, but the new terms sat lightly on those so labeled and often had no legal status. In everyday life, people who were able to function within a Hispanic context were often not labeled at all; many others changed almost at their own will from one category to another.
As mixture proceeded across the generations, the types proliferated until finally, at the time of independence, the system collapsed under its own weight. The new categorizations were all at the intermediary level; despite them, all these people, often simply called castas, assimilated to each other and intermingled, occupying the lower edge of Latin America society. The more successful and better connected among them were constantly being recognized as Spaniards, as a result of which the Spanish category grew far beyond simple biological increase and included many people with some recognizably non-European physical traits
One reaction to the excessive categorization was simplification, with only three categories -Spaniards, castas, and Indians-and often only two-Indians and others. The people of mixed descent were now so fully acculturated and so deeply embedded in local Hispanic society that they were qualified for and began to compete for nearly all positions except the very highest. There was, naturally, a reaction from those who was placed most highly in the society. With mulattoes entering the education institutions in a pretty high numbers, ordinances began to declare that they were not eligible. With the children of wealthy Spaniards, humbler and racially mixed Spaniards, and castas all intermarrying widely, government and the church began to resist, declaring marriages between those differently labeled to be illegal and reinforcing the authority of parents in disallowing matches.
Such reactions did little to change the basic reality: the intermediate groups had grown and were continuing to grow to the extent that they could no longer be confined to their traditional intermediary functions. There were too many of them for all to become the ‘sub-ordinaries’, and, in any case, many people called Indians by now could speak Spanish and handle tasks very well themselves for which intermediaries had previously been required. Since the people in the middle were no longer at a premium, their remuneration often decreased. If some pressed on into the higher strata, others were reduced to positions traditionally belonging to Indians, such as permanent laborer. In many areas the mixed groups were pouring into indigenous settlements at such a rate as to disrupt them and change their character.
Nowadays, as in almost every country in the region, the society is having a hard time in defining themselves or others. There is no clear and simple division in the society; they are not only black and white. People are being pictured in a lot of different way in a different country, and even local province. Many idioms are used such as the common ones; mulatto and mestizo, but there are other complication created by idioms such as caboclo, ladino, moreno, cholo, etc. In the Indo-American region, Indians are not called ‘Indians’ if they have international taste, graduated from university, speak in Spanish or even English. Many will called them ‘metropolitan man’ and automatically earned the right to be placed in a higher stratum. When it comes to the case of calling others, there is another problem that infringed; people are not really sure on how they suppose to label individual. Such as the confusion of how people should choose to call someone a mulatto or moreno (light brown) in Brazil, or an Indian or cholo (white Indian) in Peru. It seems that the Brazilian old proverb was proven to be true, “Money whitens skin”.
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